What Tolstoy Knew About a Good Death
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Has anyone described the fear of dying more vividly than the 19th-century Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy in The Death of Ivan Ilyich? In that novella, published in 1886, the protagonist lives the conventional, prosperous life of a Russian bourgeois. With little thought about life’s deeper meanings, he fills his days with the preoccupations of his family’s social position, his professional success, and his personal amusements.
But then Ivan Ilyich develops a mysterious ailment, which gradually worsens, confining him to bed. When it becomes apparent that he is dying, he is thrown into a profound existential crisis. “He struggled as a man condemned to death struggles in the hands of an executioner, knowing there is no escape,” writes Tolstoy. “And he felt that with every minute, despite his efforts to resist, he was coming closer and closer to what terrified him.” The story describes the horror and sadness of Ivan’s predicament with astonishing precision.
Death is inevitable, of course; the most ordinary aspect of life is that it ends. And yet, the prospect of that ending feels so foreign and frightening to us. The American anthropologist Ernest Becker explored this strangeness in his 1973 book, The Denial of Death, which led to the development by other scholars of “terror management theory.” This theory argues that we fill our lives with pastimes and distractions precisely to avoid dealing with death. As Tolstoy’s novella chronicles, this phenomenon is one of the most paradoxical facets of human behavior—that we go to such lengths to avoid attending to a certainty that affects literally every single person, and that we regard this mundane certainty as an extraordinary tragedy.
If we could resolve this dissonance and accept reality, wouldn’t life be better? The answer is most definitely yes. We know this because of the example of people who have accepted death and, in so doing, have become fully alive. With knowledge, practice, and courage, you can do this too.
A commonly held belief is that if and when someone learns that they are going to die, psychologically they deal with the grief involved in a series of clear, ordered steps: denial and isolation, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. This sequence comes from the famous work of the Swiss American psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, who devised this model for her 1969 best seller, On Death and Dying. This study had such extensive impact that the New York Public Library named it one of its “Books of the Century” in the mid-1990s.
As influential as it was, Kübler-Ross’s formula for coming to terms with dying did not actually make death easier for people to accept. One problem was that her model was interpreted in overly mechanistic and prescriptive ways by popularizers who suggested that you had to march through these stages in the fixed order. Another problem is that the experience, in her telling, is a progression of pretty much unrelieved negativity: It’s all grief, and even the final acceptance sounds essentially like a grim kind of resignation. From this, you might well conclude that distraction is indeed the best strategy—why face death unless and until you have to?
More recent work does not support the “fixed order” interpretation of the Kübler-Ross model. To begin with, researchers have shown that not everyone passes through all of her stages, and that people frequently regress in them and jump around—a point that Kübler-Ross herself made later in her career. In a paper published in 2007 in the journal JAMA, scholars found that denial or disbelief occurred only rarely, and that acceptance was where most dying people spent most of their time.
These findings also hold true for those who experience grief after losing a loved one, according to researchers writing in TheBritish Journal of Psychiatry in 2008 who conducted a 23-month study of “bereaved individuals.” Initially after a bereavement, an individual experienced a higher level of yearning, depression, and anger, but after four months on average, these feelings declined steadily. From the start, however, the participants also displayed a level of acceptance that was higher than any of these negative emotions, and this rose continuously as well. By the study’s end, peaceful acceptance far outweighed all other feelings.
Other research confirms that many people facing death are far more positive about the prospect than almost anyone would expect. In a 2017 study titled “Dying Is Unexpectedly Positive,” my Harvard colleague Michael I. Norton and his co-authors showed that people with a terminal illness or on death row wrote about their predicament in more positive terms and using fewer negative words than people who were not in that situation but were asked to write about it as if they were.
Several factors explain why a positive acceptance of impending death may be so common. One 2013 Spanish study found that terminally ill patients tended to reevaluate their life and experiences in a positive light while also embracing acceptance. Many of these patients enjoyed new forms of personal growth in their final months, through placing greater value on simple things and focusing on the present.
Interestingly, the potential benefits of facing death directly can also be found among a very different group of people: those who have had near-death experiences. As a rule, these survivors had no chance to arrive at a calm acceptance of death—typically because, unlike terminal-cancer patients, they had no time to do so in a sudden life-threatening emergency. What they had in common, though, was being confronted with their mortality—and finding that paradoxically positive. One study from 1998 showed that after a near-death experience, people became less materialistic and more concerned for others, were less anxious about their own death whenever that time would come, and enjoyed greater self-worth.
One irony about death, then, is that it remains most fearsome when most remote: When we are not forced to confront it in the immediate future, mortality is a menacing phantasm we try not to think about. But such avoidance brings no benefits, only costs. When the prospect of dying is concrete and imminent, most people are able to make the fact life-enhancing through acceptance. The real problem with death is that it messes up our being alive until it’s right in front of us.
So what if we were able to realize the benefit of facing death without it actually being imminent? Or, put another way: How can we use a positive acceptance of death to help us be more alive while we still have the most life left?
In theory, we should all be able to do this, because we’re all in a terminal state. We are all going to die; we just don’t yet know when. Lacking this precise knowledge is probably what makes it hard for us to focus on the reality of our ultimate nonbeing, and we have a good idea as to why: Neuroscientists have shown that abstract worry about something tends to mute the parts of the brain responsible for evoking vivid imagery. When your demise seems in some far-off future, you can’t easily grasp the granular fact of it, so you don’t.
The secret to benefiting from your death right now, therefore, is to make it vivid and concrete. This is exactly what Buddhist monks do when they undertake the maranasati (“mindfulness of death”) meditation. In this practice, the monks imagine their corporeal self in various states of decline and decomposition while repeating the mantra “This body, too, such is its nature, such is its future, such its unavoidable fate.”
The Stoic philosophers had a similar memento mori exercise, as Seneca urged: “The person who devotes every second of his time to his own needs and who organizes each day as if it were a complete life neither longs for nor is afraid of the next day.” Catholics hear a comparable spiritual injunction when they receive a mark made with ashes on their foreheads on Ash Wednesday: “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”
No matter what religious or philosophical tradition you adhere to, a practice like one of these is worth incorporating into your own routine. You can write your own maranasati or memento mori, say. Or, as an easier way to start, on your birthday or an annual holiday, work out roughly how many you may have left and ask yourself whether you’re really spending your scarce time the way you want.
Being mindful of mortality in this more vivid, concrete way will help you find a greater measure of that positive acceptance—and use that to be more fully alive right now. And this will help you make choices that affect other people besides yourself: At your next family gathering, consider how many more such reunions you’d want to spend with your parents or other aging relatives. Think of an actual number. Then think of what you would need to do to increase that number—by making more of an effort to travel, or by moving to live closer, or by hosting the occasion yourself?
Tolstoy’s genius was not just in his ability to depict the terror of Ivan Ilyich’s death; he was also able to make real the bliss of his ultimate acceptance of death. As the weeks of his decline went by, Ivan began to see his wife’s efforts to keep up with society’s proprieties and conventions as trivial and tiresome, and he no longer regretted missing any of that. Finally, “he searched for his accustomed fear of death and could not find it,” writes Tolstoy. Ivan’s death is no tragedy at all, but the most natural thing in the world.
Even then, though, Tolstoy is not done; he ends with a true coup de grâce. At the very moment of his death, Ivan has an epiphany that might be the most consequential insight of all. As he is fading, he hears someone say, “It is finished.” In this last flickering moment of consciousness, Ivan considers what exactly is finished. Not his life, he decides, for it dawns on him: “Death is finished … It is no more!” And then, in peace, he slips away.
